"I started writing poetry to become a better fiction writer"



Jamaican writer Kei Miller at the Reader's Bookshop, Port of Spain, Wednesday 4 July, 2007. Photograph by Georgia Popplewell

Those of you, dear readers, who missed Kei Miller's reading hosted by the CRB and the Reader's Bookshop last Wednesday evening in Port of Spain can hear Kei read two poems from his forthcoming book ("For the Girl Who Died by Dancing" and "In Praise of the Contribution of Pots"), and answer a few questions about his work, in the Caribbean Free Radio podcast I recorded with him yesterday, produced by CFR's Georgia Popplewell. (See more photographs from Kei's reading on Wednesday, also by Georgia, at Flickr.)

There Is an Anger That Moves, Kei Miller's second book of poems, will be published by Carcanet in October 2007. In early May, he did an online interview for Antilles.

"I have a feeling for ritual"

It is not an easy thing to do, to live by reason alone, and in every culture there are mysterious regions that are beyond reason. Relics of the past, perhaps not always explicable, but precious to the people who possess them. All rituals are mysterious. To do away with them is to strip people of their identity (and identity is precious) along with their ritual... I have no faith but I have a feeling for ritual. I feel it leads me to the old world. It gives me a past.

--From V.S. Naipaul's lecture on contemporary India delivered last month at a summit in London organised by the Indian magazine Tehelka. An excerpt is published under the title "The Land of Wrong Wars" in the current issue of the magazine.

A Conversation with Kei Miller

Presented by The Caribbean Review of Books and The Reader's Bookshop

The Jamaican writer Kei Miller--whose short story collection The Fear of Stones was recently shortlisted for a regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize--will read from his fiction and poems, and discuss his work with Caribbean Review of Books editor Nicholas Laughlin.

Wednesday 4 July, 2007, 7.30 pm, at The Reader's Bookshop, 1 Middle Street (at Patna Street), St James, Port of Spain.

Admission is free, and all are invited. Copies of Miller's books will be on sale. For further information, contact The Reader's Bookshop at 628-7221, or email crb@meppublishers.com.

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"Kei Miller ... writes with passionate understanding of bruised, repressed, and deprived selves seeking, achieving, or failing to find release and freedom."
-- Edward Baugh, reviewing Miller's debut books of fiction and poems in the February 2007 CRB

Kei Miller is the author of The Fear of Stones (2006), a book of short fiction, and Kingdom of Empty Bellies (2006), a book of poems, and the editor of New Caribbean Poetry (2007), an anthology showcasing eight poets from across the Caribbean. His second book of poems, There Is an Anger That Moves, will be published later this year, and his first novel will appear in 2008. The Fear of Stones was shortlisted for the Best First Book award, Caribbean and Canada, in the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prizes.